Explained Binance vs WazirX: The cryptic crypto ownership & the ED angle

There is a war of words on Twitter between crypto giant Binance and homegrown Wazirx which as left 15 million of the users confused and possibly in the lurch.

What happened?
Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by trading volume, said on Friday it doesn’t own India-based platform WazirX. This came as a surprise to many including WazirX founders who had announced the acquistion 2 years ago.

The Trigger
Binance issued the statement hours after the Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Friday said it had frozen bank balances of Rs 64.67 crore belonging to WazirX.

What is the Binance & WazirX connection
Binance CEO Zhao released a series of tweets clarifying that Binance doesn’t own any equity in Zanmai Labs and only provides wallet services to WazirX as a technology solution.

Turning Back Time
BUT WAIT! Many netizens are then confused by the much publicised images from 2019 where Binance CEO and the top team at WazirX posed together while detailing in a bolg how platform users would be able to buy cryptocurrencies using Indian rupees.

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What's WazirX's Stand?
Nischal Shetty, the co-founder of WazirX crypto exchange stood his ground as he battled with the Binance CEO on Twitter. Stating that Binance owns WazirX domain name and Binance has root access of AWS servers and all the Crypto assets and profits.

How are users impacted?
Binance provides wallet services for WazirX as a tech solution and as Zhao tweeted has the ability to shut down wallet services. Binance chief sent a panic wave throught the users as he said WazirX should transfer their funds to Binance.

Crypto Concerns: ED issues show cause notice to WazirX

The heart of the issue remains the ED watch on WazirX. The Directorate of Enforcement (ED) on Friday conducted searches on one of the directors of Zanmai Lab Pvt Ltd, which operates WazirX, and issued a freeze order on its bank accounts.

To distance themselves further Binance CEO informed its followers on Twitter “The WazirX founding team maintained control of the operations of the platform,” Zhao wrote. “We (Binance) were never given data or control of users, KYC, etc. We would love to work with ED to fix these issues in WazirX.”